Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, in the light of the religious and cultural history of the Eastern Slavic world, the roots and developments of the process of creating a national church in Ukraine, endowed with its own autonomy, as has already happened in other countries of the Orthodox tradition. The focus is not on the purely canonical aspects of the issue, but on the concepts of “ethnicityµ (or “nationµ) and “territoryµ, which belong to the cultural-historical and anthropological sphere, identifying some aspects that characterise the processes of the creation of autocephalous churches in the Eastern Slavic world.